Welcome to the home of the Spindletop Railroad!

Follow along as I try to create a freelanced railroad and build my first HO scale layout. I hope to write a blog that helps others in building layouts, detailing engines, and creating their own railroads while identifying the road bumps to avoid and the fun aspects of model railroading to look forward to!

Monday, March 2, 2015

Progress Update

Howdy everyone!

I have had a LOT of free time lately.  Turns out getting laid off can do that to you.  So while this means trains funds are essentially nothing (read: actually nothing) it also means that I can do what I can with what I have.  Which is a lot actually!  There is seriously a huge list of things to do.

Right now I am working on the scenery.  I added some hills of extruded foam and coated about half of the layout in brown paint.  I am most of the way done covering everything in a layer of Woodland Scenics Green Blend fine turf as a base layer.  There will be several more layers of scenery to come.  I also will be adding the ballast to the yard while I do the rest of the scenery.  The basics can be seen in the below picture.  Hopefully I can get some better pictures and process explanations up later this week.

In addition to all of this, I used what was left of the train budget (and some begging of the CFO) on a new engine at the local train show.  I like supporting the vendors at the Greater Houston Area Train Show as they are typically small time guys and they have great prices and even better customer service.  I bought the below engine for only $50.  They are going for over double that on eBay...  Anyways, this Athearn SD45 is a great runner.  I have some extra details laying around that I can spruce it up with.  It is also pretty close to the base black color I want the railroad to have.


I will have to cover up the PRR logos, but I will hopefully be able to do that soon.  I downloaded a free Vector file program called Inkscape.  It will be used to design some custom decals that several fellow modelers on the internet will print for a nominal fee.  That will be so much simpler than putting on individual letters...  

Until next time!


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